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Three Excuses Software Vendors Cannot Make Anymore

Last year was a great year in numerous ways for me. Also because I had the opportunity to see a lot of new products being demoed to me (if you would like to provide me with a demo, read more about how you could pitch me here). However in many demos there were still some poor excuses which were more a showcase of lack of skills than a real excuses. Therefore a small list of three excuses you cannot come up with any more:

Sorry, our people need to be on premise for maintenance

As you might have noticed we the Curiosity has landed on Mars taking many wonderful pictures and doing great research. However did you also know that the engineers of the Curiosity rover did an over the air software update. Of course what Apple did was very interesting with their over the air updates on the iOS devices, however what the NASA did was an update from Earth to Mars, which is pretty impressive. So stop with your excuses that your guys (or girls) have to be on premise to do maintenance.

Sorry, we don’t have an internet connection here

Felix Baumgartner was 40km up in the sky before he started his long (and fast fall). Every bit of this of jump was streamed live, in HD! If you can get a decent connection 40km up in the air to stream at least 720p, you must be able to get some kind of connectivity in a more urban area. Prepare yourself and make sure you have a backup (and a backup of the backup) internet connection with you when you have to demo something which requires an internet connection.

Sorry, our live demo doesn’t work

Demos and particularly live demos are still something that is hard for many companies to do right. Most often there are glitches, failures and other unexpected behaviours that leave the one who provides the demo embarrassed. Google has redefined how you can do your demo in a more exciting way? Did you ever do a demo of your product while doing a parachute jump, jumping over buildings with a BMX and abseiling from a huge building? I guess not. And probably you didn’t do it streaming this demo live. Google did and that is the reason you have absolutely no reason to have a failing demo. Since your demo is most likely in a very controlled environment doing just ‘boring’ stuff.

Just stop making excuses and start being excellent. You are not updating software on Mars, jumping out of a capsule on 40km up in the air or demoing your product during skydiving. You are doing simple things, why should it be then so hard to do it right.